Thursday, March 20, 2014

In the Beginning

Sri Lanka, the
teardrop of India

I found my way to
this quaint island quite by accident. For several years I’d been writing What’s a Girl to Do?, an adventure columns
for national and regional American publications, showing women (and men) that
they didn’t have to sit around and complain about having nothing to do.

That may sound odd
to people living in countries where just the act of surviving takes up a full
day. Day after day. But I was writing for Americans who have time to ponder
what to do next. On a monthly basis I led a charmed life: I jumped out of an
airplane, was head-butted by a shark, learned to fly on a trapeze, tried hang-gliding,
drove a race car, slammed a golf ball the length of a fairway, and learned how
to stir macrobiotic food in a North-South direction. Amazingly I lived to write
about it.

In December of 2002
I left California, bound for the Maldives on what was to have been a simple
nine-day location story for Sport Diver
Magazine. On the last day there, I decided to hop over to Sri Lanka for
Ayurveda treatment and shopping. Once on the island I fell madly for everything
Sri Lankan, and stayed.

‘Are you in love?’
my friends emailed me.

‘Yes,’ I wrote
back. I had fallen in love with the people, the culture and the island itself.
I stayed because I could not stop taking photographs of the children with
giant, black-as-night eyes, of the Buddhist monks with their dark skin
contrasting against their brilliant orange robes, the muscled arms of
low-country drummers as they held a beat all night long, the ancient ruins of
long ago kings, baby elephants hiding from the scorching sun in shadows cast by
their mothers, and the pristine beaches where one should fall in love.

Sri Lanka is a
complex land full of many cultures that I still have yet to explore, villages I
want to visit and old people, children, tattala,
ammala (fathers, mothers) whose faces will undoubtedly capture my heart.